The Symfony blog has another in their "2014 Year in Review" series posted, this time with a focus on the London Symfony meetups and the presentations that were made.

2014 was a really successful year for the Symfony Meetup Group in London. I've been involved helping to organize these meetups for a few years now, but it was never a regular thing until this year. With a huge help of my SensioLabs UK colleagues we managed to bring the group to the next level. Each meetup we're getting around 60-90 attendees, which is a big improvement compared to the previous years. We also started recording the talks. Since the Symfony community in London is much bigger, I believe we can do even better in 2015!

Talks presented this year included:

Optimizing Your Front End Workflow

Applying Domain Driven Design with Symfony2 projects

Silex saved me from my legacy code

Scaling Symfony2 apps with RabbitMQ

Speed up your Symfony2 application and build awesome features with Redis

Each topic has a summary, a link to the slides and a video of the presentation (if available).

The Three Devs & A Maybe podcast has posted their latest episode today, another "ramblecast" of the hosts Michael Budd, Fraser Hart, Lewis Cains and Edd Manntalking about a wide range of topics. This is episode #43.

Being without a guest this episode, gave us the excuse to ramble on about many different topics that have been on our minds for the past couple of weeks.

The Three Devs & A Maybe podcast has released their latest episode: Episode #27 - Ramble On. In it hosts Michael Budd, Fraser Hart, Lewis Cains and Ed Mann well...ramble on about various topics.

In this weeks show we decided to have a good ramble about a couple of topics that have cropped us this week. Ranging from freelance experiences, cheese-based Lorem Ipsum text, and famous Albert Einstein quotes. By the end we start to discuss our personal software deployment strategies, briefly touching on Docker, which will be the topic of next weeks show.

On the SitePoint PHP blog today Bruno Skvorc has posted some tips to helping you become a "PHP professional" and advance your skills and, potentially, your career in web application development.

When reading various PHP related blogs, Quora questions, Google+ communities, newsletters and magazines, I often notice extreme polarization of skill. Questions are either at the "How do I connect to a MySQL database?" level or something in the range of "How do I best scale my mailing system to send over one million emails per hour without introducing a new server?" I personally distinguish between 4 distinct levels of PHP prowess (likely applicable to any language/profession): beginner, intermediate, professional and elite.

He starts by looking at "the extremes" - the absolute beginners and the highly experienced professionals that have spent a lot of time "honing their skill". Somewhere in the middle are the intermediate developers. These are the ones he focuses on for the rest of the article, providing them with the knowledge and resource to advance. His recommendations include:

Abandon spaghetti code

Learn to set up your own PHP environment

Exercise best practices early

Read

Find a buddy/mentor

There's a description for each one - and several more - with links to resources and other information to get more detail.

Ben Ramsey has a new post to his site where he reviews the "eras" of PHP that it's gone through in the past few years and ends up with what he calls the "Era of Testing" - the recent strong push that's being made to promote and encourage unit testing in PHP applications.

Over the past decade, the PHP community has progressed through a handful of distinct eras that have each been marked by a focus on specific best practices. This is most evident in the types of talks presented at conferences and user groups and in the articles published by php|architect magazine, PHPDeveloper.org, and the blogs of those whose feeds are distributed through Planet PHP. In thinking through this, I've come up with the following eras I think we, the PHP community, have had over the last ten years. These are in a general order, but eras overlap, and some have lasted longer than others, so there's not a distinct beginning or end to each.

He briefly covers five different areas that PHP has evolved in over the past years: the shift to OOP, web application security, framework use, coding standards/organization and the push for better testing.

With the coming of the testing era, I'm seeing a lot of maturity in our community. The code we write is getting better. We're following standards and best practices. We're implementing a lot of good design principles. [...] I think the decade since PHP 5 was released has brought us to a great place as a community. [...] With each new era, we can't forget what we've learned, though. We must continue teaching and revising these best practices as we learn more.

In response to some of the recent talk about the quality of PHP and some of the recent suggestions about the right and wrong ways to write PHP, the PHP The Right Way site has been lunched.

There's a lot of bad information on the Web (I'm looking at you, W3Schools) that leads new PHP users astray, propagating bad practices and bad code. This must stop. PHP: The Right Way is an easy-to-read, quick reference for PHP best practices, accepted coding standards, and links to authoritative tutorials around the Web. It is important to understand there is no canonical way to use PHP. That's the beauty of it. This website introduces new PHP developers to best practices, available options, and good information.

The site has some "getting started" tips for working with PHP 5.4, links to some of the current PSR standards and gets into some of the best practices for things like proper OOP structure, namespacing and using the SPL. There's also hints on using Composer for package management, working with databases and some basic parts on security and testing.

Additionally, the site is also an open source project so you can contribute your own content (it'll have to be approved before merging) on topics you might not see or want to improve.

On Reddit.com there's a good discussion going on to answer the question "What non-PHP stuff should a PHP developer know?"

I was looking at job description for a web developer, and one of the big responsibilities was database maintenance. [...] And along those lines, what other skills would be useful for a PHP developer to have that aren't directly PHP-based?

Before our memories get swamped by our daily lives, let's take a look back at the Dutch PHP Conference 2011. For me, two things stand out when I look back on this years DPC. One was the rate at which ideas were exchanged, both during the regular conference days and at the associated social events. [...] The other thing to stand out was the fact that many talks were not about PHP.

He goes on to talk about the ratios of PHP to non-PHP talks (only 37% were PHP-specific!) and breaks down the non-PHP talks into a few different categories including architecture, tooling, front end development and general framework updates. He also compares this to the PHP talks and came out with some interesting results.

For today's PHP development teams, generic software engineering principles and technologies allied to PHP have become part of their architectures and daily work routine. It is only logical that we want to know more about them and learn about new ones. It is no surprise then, that we see schedules at PHP conferences which include a good proportion of talks that are not directly about PHP itself.

Rafael Dohms has posted a wrapup of this year's php|tek '11 conference and has included some of his thoughts about the "trending technologies" he saw during his time there.

Another edition of php|tek has come and gone and this year some very amazing topics came into view. The conference itself was once again a great experience, great people, incredible speakers, lots of activities and incredible hack-a-thons and unconference sessions.

Topics he noticed coming to the forefront at this year's event included:

Cloud computing (and the PHP-specific offerings related to it)

Mobile development

API and external tool integration

He also mentions one thing he wouldn't mind seeing more of at events - the "soft skills" sort of presentations. They're less about the technology that's used and more about the "people skills" developers can use to make the best of their careers.